Yoko Ono - OPEN WINDOW um elfahem exhibit

ESSAY FROM THE CATALOG WRITTEN BY SHLOMIT SHAKED.
Reproduced with permission from the author

How symbolic that the phrase ’Open Window’, in Arabic, Hebrew and English, should be inscribed on one of the works made by the artist Yoko Ono for her show in Umm El-Fahem -- a huge billboard installed at the town’s entrance. ”We are afraid of opening windows, and then we complain that people don’t see us” says Yoko Ono, ”the fear is destructive and leads nowhere”.* The director of the Umm El-Fahem Art Gallery, Said Abu Shakra, reads the sign OPEN WINDOW as a window of opportunity for a gallery in process, a place in process, human beings in process.

The billboard OPEN WINDOW embodies the equation art-life-society a work of art which seeks to create a dialogue with the place. The sign is installed on the Wadi Arrah road at the entrance to Umm El-Pahem, in order to invite the town’s residents, occasional travellers and visitors from the Arab and Jewish sectors to a dialogue of trust. OPEN WINDOW offers a passage from one situation to another -- the known and the unknown. The work pushes the boundaries of aesthetic and social norms, opening them to questioning, to dialogue.

The message embodied in OPEN WINDOW alludes to WAR IS OVER! if you want it, a billboard which Yoko Ono installed thirty years ago, together with John Lennon, in different cities around the world -- New York, Berlin, Paris, Rome, Los Angeles and London. The sign was put up in popular sites, using the media, marketing techniques and advertisement tools to convey the message. In December 1998, the billboard was installed again in New York’s Time Square as a Christmas gift from Yoko Ono. She invited the city’s residents to have their photos taken in front of the billboard, to take pictures of their friends and families and to circulate the photographs, the message: ”If one billion people in the world would think peace -- we’re going to get it. You may think ’well, how are we going to get one billion people to think? Isn’t this something we should leave to the politicians, who have the power to do these things?’ Well, politicians cannot do anything without your support. We are the power. Remember, you don’t have to do much. The power works in delicate and mysterious ways. Visualize the domino effect. Thoughts are infectious.” WAR IS OVER! if you want it has also been installed in Helsinki, Reykjavik and most recently in Jerusalem and Vancouver.

Unlike WAR IS OVER! if you want it, which functions as a subversive element by invading the scene of boisterous advertisement billboards, which seduce the viewer/ potential consumer with tempting brand-names, OPEN WINDOW stands on a highway filled with road-signs and signposts. While frustrating the drivers’ expectations of directions or traffic information, the sign offers an alternative idea-direction: to think open window. To think trust. The performative participation in the idea offered by Yoko Ono inspires self-awareness as an option for a deconstruction of the ’self’.

Yoko Ono lets the viewers participate in an occurrence in which their involvement with the piece will be determined in direct proportion to their moral standing. The installation Play it by Trust, first shown in 1966, comprises of a chess table and chairs painted white. The Chess pieces placed on the table are white as well. In order to realize the game under the given conditions, the players are required to have more than experience and cleverness, they are required to have mutual trust. Arthur Koestler perceives the game of Chess as a paradoxical combination of logic and pure imagination, staged like a choreography of symbolic figures on a mosaic of 64 squares, and a deadly gladiatorial battle. Marcel Duchamp’s view of Chess was ambiguous as well. Chess for him was, on the one hand, perhaps the most cerebral art form, and, on the other, similar to a boxing ring.

Yoko Ono offers her viewers a game in which there are no black and white, winners or losers. In contrast to Duchamp, who talked about losing oneself in the game, and to his well-known desire for impersonality through art, Ono’s works invite the viewer to take active or mental part in them. Thus she opens them up to different variations on a theme, like in Jazz music. Her notion of opening the work to infinite possibilities is close to that of the composer John Cage. While examining their inner world-views through the game, Yoko Ono offers the viewers an aesthetic enjoyment of the abstract image, which is close in spirit to the poetic idea in writing.

The poet Mallarme claimed in an early piece that art has secrets and that it should protect them. His notion creates a distance between the viewers and the artist, and is reminiscent of the bachelors in Duchamp’s piece Large Glass, who are frozen in time (though their encounter with the bride may be realized in the viewer’s mind). Duchamp allows the watching of his work, but he blocks the entering of it. The viewers, like the bachelors, are consistently deferred and remain frustrated, turning from observers into voyeurs. Yoko Ono, in contrast, refuses to treat the work as a terra incognita, a kind of forbidden, isolated Garden of Eden. As does John Lennon, who suggests, in his song Imagine, that we imagine an open world with no heaven (or hell). Both invite us to pass through the glass without getting hurt, like Alice when she entered Wonderland.

Yoko Ono is an artist, composer, vocalist, poet, activist and humanitarian. Ono, who has become a living legend, played a key role in the forming of the sixties avant-garde in New York, London and Tokyo. From an early age she studied Western Classical music, and, as an adult, opera and lieder. Later on she studied composition, poetry and philosophy in Japan and the United States. Already at the beginning of her artistic career, in the late fifties, her works shattered social taboos, including Japanese social manners, and challenged traditional art and anything considered an iconic object.

In 1953, at the age of 20, Yoko Ono moved from Tokyo to New York. She was acquainted with the music of John Cage (who was knowledgeable in Zen aesthetics and thought). Between the years 1960-1961 she organized in her loft on Chamber Street in New York, together with La Monte Young, the Chambers Street Series -- performances, concerts and lectures which were open to the public, and in which took part artists such as Robert Morris, Richard Maxfield and Henry Flint. Present in those events were art-world figures such as Peggy Guggenheim, Max Ernst and Duchamp. This series, in her Chambers Street loft, became the catalyst from which the philosophy of Fluxus was crystallized.

In Contrast to her Fluxus colleagues who used musical instruments,Yoko Ono focused on the human voice. In her concerts she integrated a recurrent mix of sighs, heavy breathing, shouting and gibberish. The music she composed and performed in the sixties and the seventies, with the disciplined use of her voice combined with orchestral sections, undermined classical orchestral structures. Her attitude to painting was similar: Instruction Paintings (1961) were in fact verbal or written instructions which the viewer was supposed to imagine or think. The imagined paintings, some of the first conceptual works in contemporary art, heralded the aesthetics of Fluxus that George Maciunas defined and led starting in 1961. Already at the beginning of her artistic career Yoko Ono detached her work from any conventional modes of legitimization. Between the years 1962-64 she exhibited her conceptual art in Japan. In Tokyo she participated, with John Cage and other artists, in the concert Music Walk, which was based on an existing score. Due to the opening of the score to interpretations -- during its performance by the participating artists -- there is an a-priori relinquishment of the notion of faithfulness to the original. By the end of the piece, or during it, its identity changes and the question of ownership (copyrights) remains open. Yoko Ono’s text-works are kinds of scores that invite the audience to take part in their composition, while examining questions of ownership, participation and co-operation. Since the early sixties Ono has based her conceptual works on the potential of words to communicate with the viewers, the listeners.

Blue Room Event is a conceptual architecture made with words which represent ideas. The text that Yoko Ono wrote on the walls of one of the spaces at the Umm El-Fahem Art Gallery invites the viewers to undertake a poetic thought-exercise of imaginary construction. Blue Room Event is made of simple written instructions, which function as the lines of a poem. It’s as if Ono intends to defeat material reality, the utilitarian need to find matter in spirit. She removes the noises of matter in order to allow for a purified mental space of contemplation.Blue Room has been recreated in different countries, but it was first realized in New York in 1966.

In 1965 Ono built an imaginary room made of words, and dedicated it to Maciunas -- ”the Architect of Deception”, as she called him. In his essay Terrain Vague, the curator Jon Hendricks describes the first version of Blue Room: to the walls, windows, ceiling and floor of the claustrophobic space of her Manhattan apartment, Yoko Ono attached signs bearing short texts hand-written by her. The imaginary deconstruction of the existing environment enabled a conceptual space. Her imagination-games originate in thinking-diversions she learned as a child. The daughter of a banker, her family reached a state of starvation during the Second World War. Yoko Ono and her brother used to satiate their hunger with imaginary meals they invented.

Yoko Ono’s simple texts were written by a sophisticated artist, who is familiar with the modes of expression of the naive genre, and who uses it consciously, including her distance from it within her writing. Ono has acknowledged the resemblance between her work and the expressions and enigmatic phrases of the Japanese Koan, which she sees as a dialogue with the self. Zen teachers use the Koan to challenge their pupils to rational thought which will lead them to enlightenment. Yoko Ono’s poetry can be seen as a kind of sermon which doesn’t relate to any specific time or space, which doesn’t answer but asks, which teaches modesty to those who presume to know everything.

In order to get rid of an ugly and heavy object which was part of the furniture in the room she had rented in Manhattan, Yoko Ono placed a sign on it, on which she wrote: ”This Is Not Here”. In 1971 The Village Voice ran an advert announcing the forthcoming exhibition This Is Not Here which was to take place at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. A sign announcing the exhibition was hung in the museum’s window. The exhibition was offered to the viewers as an idea, liberated from the chains of time, space and matter.

Yoko Ono uses the medium of water as a common element and as a nourishing means of connecting between people. In 1971 she exhibited at the Everson Museum in Syracuse, New York, another version of This Is Not Here. She invited artists and friends to participate with her in the making of a water sculpture. They were asked to bring with them a water container or an idea which would form half of the sculpture, while Ono herself would supply the other half -- water. This recalled the installation half-a-room (1967), in which the audience were asked to complete-fill in the missing-empty part. In her concert Grapefruit in the World of Park (1961), Yoko Ono used the sound of flushing bathroom water. In Water Piece (1964) she invited viewers to ”steal the moon on the water with a bucket/ Keep stealing until no moon is seen on/ the water.” It is hard to ignore the clever and amusing humour that these works offer as part of their human message.

During preparations for the exhibition OPEN WINDOW we were asked to prepare two containers, to which Yoko Ono would provide the content -- around 10,000 pieces of ”water” and pieces of ”sky”. Sky - Water consists of two simple buckets filled up with blue jigsaw-puzzle pieces, labelled either ’Water Peace’ or ’Sky Peace’. Each piece is part of a much larger whole: ”Each of us is part of the universe while embodying the whole. Like the sky and the oceans. All the parts somehow connect to one another”. The works are presented to the visitors as an ideational offering of water, sky and peace. They are invited to dip their hands in the buckets and partake in the offering -- pick up a piece -- in order to conceptually become part of a larger whole. Sky - Water examines the idea of recycling and its potential to heal, inspire hope and unite. Stone Peace is a conceptual continuation of Sky - Water; the work consists of three piles of stones, each named after a local village: Ein Silya, Ar’arrah and Bat Shlomo. The visitors are invited to take a stone from one of the piles, thus becoming, conceptually, part of all the participants. Both Sky - Water and Stone Peace exist as a possibility. They are offered as an idea for observation.

Yoko Ono disguises the things which can be touched or looked at, in order to allow them to be. Her claim that ”the absence of form is also form” is relevant, yet it doesn’t annul the fact that her works avoid any defined shape and exist as a continuous and infinite process. Her texts, poems and conceptual concerts reject the completed form, thus opening up to surprising meanings and etymologies. Form in Yoko Ono’s work is, as Jon Hendricks remarks, the body which contains the idea and conducts it. Her instruction pieces can be reproduced and realized in different spaces, materials and times, without changing the original ’score’. It is tempting to assume that the very denial of the structural order of a system, which characterizes Yoko Ono’s work, establishes what Georges Bataille called the ’Inform’ (Formless). The ’Inform’ is nothing on its own. It originates in a dynamic of transposition from one place to another. That is, it exists only as something performative or operative. The web of connections that Yoko Ono creates, the opening of the work to different modes of reading -- criss-crossing, interweaving and constructing -- create the dynamic of a process which cancels any pre-dictated, absolute form.

Disappearing Piece (1966) is but one of the works which epitomize this idea of the formless which characterizes a variety of Ono’s works. So is her frequent use of the colour white, which, she says, doesn’t interfere with thought. Whiteness as a metaphor for transformation, development and transcendence characterizes also the clear medium of water and sky, as a distinct expression of the absence of form.

Yoko Ono sees the absolute and hermetic as an opening for violence, or, to use her own words: ”Any theory that claims absoluteness is bound to be destroyed, to be surrounded by violence. The firm assertion that something is finished, ready -- ’here it is’ -- is a male quality. When something becomes a static B Flat, it makes me want to tear up and destroy”. The blurring, the temporariness and the ambivalence of the female image -- a portrait of Yoko Ono manipulated by computer in Portrait of Nora (1991) -- rescue it from the stereotypical chains. The title refers to the liberated woman Nora, the heroine of Ibsen’s play The Doll House. The work examines, according to Ono, the complex relationship that women have with male power and authority.

Yoko Ono’s dissociation from any defined form, as an expression of the viewer’s liberation from forms and images which have been imposed on our culture, can be detected in performance pieces from the beginning of her career and up to the present day. In Bag Piece (1965), which she performed together with Tony Cox, her ex-husband, the two got into a black sack, took their clothes off, got dressed again, and stepped out of the sack. Apart from the erotic-ironic implications, the elements of suspense and voyeurism, the piece realizes the contradiction between inner occurrences and what is visible to the eye.

In Wrapping Event (1967), Yoko Ono wrapped a piece of cloth around the lion sculpture in London’s Trafalgar Square -- a militant, masculine symbol of power -- an image that represents nothing but itself. In the event Sky Piece for Jesus Christ (first realized in the 60s), she bandaged with gauze a group of orchestra musicians, until finally they fell silent. In such acts Yoko Ono cloaks fixed cultural representations -- a classical sculpture, classical music -- and transposes them to the womb from which they had sprung -- the subconscious.

Planting Wish Tree for Peace 1999,
Umm El-Fahem Art Gallery,
Photograph: Anan Studio [ Umm El-Fahem ]

Wish Tree for Peace, constructed in the courtyard of the Umm El-Fahem Gallery, consists of a Lemon tree and a bronze plaque inviting the visitors to whisper their wishes to the tree’s bark. An area of steps painted Mediterranean blue surrounds the lemon tree, creating a site which allows for contemplation. ”It’s important to me to use basic elements which belong to the planet on which people live, rather than things which have become meaningless materials. The tree symbolizes the future, rejuvenation. I want my work to stimulate an organic process of change and growth.’ Since 1996, Wish Tree has been shown in various sites around the world. The choice of tree was always respective to the place: a Grapefruit tree was chosen in Santa Monica, California, a Camellia tree in Richmond, Virginia, a Pomegranate tree in Alicante, Spain, an Epe tree in Brasellia, a Lime tree in Oxford, England and most recently an Olive tree in Jerusalem. The Lemon tree is mentioned in the poetry and iconography of the Mediterranean cultures. As opposed to other citrus trees, the lemon blossoms and yields fruit throughout the year. The passivity of the tree vis-ý-vis human beings can also hint at the violent option of the man-tree equation -- its dependency and helplessness in the face of the human cutter, in the face of the tyranny of utilitarianism.

Wish Tree, like many of Yoko Ono’s works, is an autobiographical work. It originates in a childhood memory charged with Japanese sensibilities and aesthetics. In accordance with Japanese custom in Shinto and Zen Buddhist temples, visitors would buy from the temple a pre-printed message of good luck, tie it into a knot and hang it on a branch of the tree in the courtyard. The trees in the church courtyards looked from afar like white blossoms. The joining together of the whispers, which emanate from a human vessel, and the tree as a receptacle -- both metaphors for the myth of birth and fertility -- creates a coupling which generates growth.

The temporary and fragile character of Yoko Ono’s works does not prevent them from carrying central moral dilemmas, which expose hidden human activities. The way in which the series of photographs Horizontal Memory (1997) -- photographs of anonymous people -- was laid out on the floor, makes it hard for the viewers to advance without stepping on them. Their very involvement turns the viewers into symbolic accomplices in an act of abuse. Their moral decision becomes a central element in the work. In the work A Painting To Be Stepped On (1960-61), Yoko Ono invited the audience to step on a canvas which she spread on the gallery’s floor. On the personal level, the work functioned as a discharge of childhood memories: as a girl she heard the story of the early Japanese Christians, who were faced with the option of stepping on the image of Christ, or being crucified. Many preferred crucifixion to defiling the sacred image. The violent act, which the viewers are asked to perform on the canvas, displaces their experience of the representational into a philosophical-conceptual reading, as well as an examination of the limits of morality.

It is interesting to mention that in 1961, Andy Warhol laid a canvas in front of the door to his apartment, so that his visitors would step on it and soil it. In 1962 Warhol painted diagrams of Tango steps on the floor. Warhol was responding ironically to the Action Paintings of Jackson Pollock, who used to spread his canvases on the floor and assault them, in kinds of spontaneous bursts of violence, with splinters of colour and litter such as cigarettes, coins, pins etc. Yoko Ono’s Kitchen Piece (1960-61) -- a combination of a performance piece with an instructional text (performed at her Chambers Street loft) -- also responded to Action Painting. She threw jam, ink and eggs at the canvas on the wall, smeared them with her hands and set the canvas on fire. Ono, however, displaces and channels the potential violence and rage of the viewers towards the artistic object, while confronting them with these emotions.

The performative act enables Yoko Ono to raise the question of the right to invade another person’s life. Yet, in all of her works, the performative act embodies an intellectual representation of a process which leads to self-awareness. In the performance piece Cut Piece (1964), Ono invited the viewers to use scissors to cut out pieces of the garment she was wearing, and take them away with them. In the instructions she wrote that the performer did not have to be a woman. Cut Piece, which examines the subject of trust and shearing (also related to the Christian Communion), expresses the artist’s perception of what happens to women in society. The act of cutting on a passive victim also reveals hidden perversions in the participants and in the spectators (voyeurs), as well as their dilemmas.

The installation Crickets in the exhibition Open Window examines human brutality. The piece consists of thirteen ancient cricket cages. A silver plate on which are engraved the place and the date of a global human tragedy is attached to each of the cages. On these dates, the singing of the crickets stopped. A plaque on the wall reads: ”These crickets were captured in the regions and on the dates noted on the plates”. Crickets responds to a childhood memory: ”Every Japanese child remembers the times he or she picked up a cricket, put it in a cage, and listened to its singing. In my childhood I thought that all the children in the world listened like me to the singing of the crickets”. Art doesn’t corroborate utilitarian time -- it creates its own time: Yoko Ono’s work makes all times meet. The mythical identification between death and poetry permits them.

The cages are kinds of memorials for the human brutality which has nipped poetry, life, in the bud. The cages as a metaphor for an empty territory, a locus of silence, function as vessels for apocalyptic memories -- a void, which contains laconic conceptual information (signs) on the March of Folly of a humanity which refuses to learn from its past. Or, to paraphrase Hegel, history teaches, but humanity doesn’t learn. The potential for poetry embodied in the death cages carries an ironic tone which leads to self-reflection. The visitors are invited to record their own ’cricket’ memories in a writing book.

Yoko Ono’s works are fashioned from the harsh matter of honesty, of loneliness and love. She sheds the rotten and the malignant like superfluous skin, in order to leave only the self. Her works touch the viewers without effort or aggressive provocation. Her intention is to inspire thought, not to attack dormant nerves with spectacles, or to put up a horrifying mirror before the society she lives in. Since the beginning of her career Ono has always put the audience at the top of her list of priorities.

The spirit which characterizes Yoko Ono’s work is summarized in 11 Instruction Paintings -- a series of 11 canvases that she has prepared for Open Window: ”Forget”, ”Feel”, ”Dream”, ”Remember”, ”Yes”, ”Touch”, ”Fly”, ”Imagine”, ”Breathe”, ”Reach”, ”Open”. Yoko Ono invites the viewers to take part in mental activities which relate to the present and the future. She painted these words in light greenish acrylic on a linen fabric. She refers to these words as ’text talk’, containing important words that are frequently absent from interpersonal communication.

In Asian culture it is customary to hang calligraphic paintings on the home walls: ”In Asia they admire calligraphic paintings not only because of their graphic qualities. The meaning of the words is no less important. Words like ’a bright day’ make you feel like a bright day. It’s a message that penetrates your subconscious”. The elements which define Yoko Ono’s sensibilities have always been her optimism and her mischievous humour. The relentless search for the positive and the purified comes, she says, from the fact that she sees the dark side of the world so frequently, that she has to balance it with a positive perspective.

* All the quotes refer to a conversation with Yoko Ono conducted by the author in October 1999, unless otherwise noted.

::: onoweb :::

::: newstand :::

::: library :::

::: the paths :::

::: BOOKS // OPEN WINDOW :::

OPEN WINDOW
UM EL FAHEM, ISRAEL, EXHIBITION CATALOG

::: BOOKS // OPEN WINDOW :::

OPEN WINDOW UM EL FAHEM, ISRAEL, EXHIBITION CATALOG

OPEN WINDOW
UM EL FAHEM, ISRAEL, EXHIBITION CATALOG